Karen Heller: Let us speak of better things

During an interview with a Manhattan playwright some years ago, the conversation took a bizarre turn. Richard Greenberg, the toast of Broadway, successful by almost any standard, started discussing real estate, which in New York is how they talk about money.

"How much does your apartment cost?" he asked. "You bought a house? How much? Would I like living in Philadelphia?"

This is why you live in Philadelphia, I thought at the time, so you don't have to obsess about money and end up talking to a stranger about real estate instead of art and the issues that matter to you most.

Of course, money - or a precipitous lack thereof - is all that people talk about now.

On the paths, on the trails, runners come and go speaking of Dow Jones. Even on vacations, the place we work so hard to get to so we don't have to talk about work, sum worshippers dissect the economy's follies, the price of everything.

Many people were raised not to discuss money except with family members. It wasn't polite to do so; it was the mark of a bore. The goal was to make enough so we didn't have to worry, at least publicly and on a daily basis; then we'd engage in more productive chatter.

No more. Money dominates the news. Taming budgets of state and local governments dwarfs other issues. Virtually every business appears in play, at the mercy of prevailing economic winds. Banks are followed like sports teams.

Some days it feels as if we're living inside CNBC, with constant anxiety of numbers multiplying exponentially and invariably southward. Numb, we believe such knowledge is useful, only to realize that, within days, it has all shifted again.

Hand-wringing alters little. It's as hard to vanquish a deficit or unregulated financial derivatives as it is to win a war on terror, that hollow, fear-producing, deficit-driving term that the Obama administration blessedly retired.

Hating Bernie Madoff, AIG, and bailed-out bank executives offers little solace.

Mostly what we talk about when we talk about money is cutting and cutting, in government, professionally and personally. We're fluent in the language of debt, subtraction, the takeaway, the absence of programs, staples and everyday stuff. We're filled with doing without.

Like a diet, this leaves us hungry and cranky. Can't we talk about something beautiful and strong? Like Michelle Obama's arms?

At this time of holidays celebrating spring, peace and renewal, perhaps we should turn attention away from money, which makes us nervous, to matters that truly enrich our lives.

Many observers have taken the downturn as a correction, not merely in bank accounts but also values. Money, in many ways, is a mere concept. It trades in the ether. It shifts on paper. Many Americans lost investment gains that, while offering security, had yet to be enjoyed and were earned not through diligence but market vagaries. We've lost what we never knew.

If a house is worth less than its overappraisal from a year ago, is it any less inviting a home?

Beauty, despite what women's magazines preach, is abundant without cost or sacrifice, especially in the spring. Joy is a random everyday gift. Exercise is free. Art, everywhere.

If we do more for the people who have so much less, which would be most people on the planet, give our time, offer services or goods, we feel richer for doing so.

Besides, the Phils, along with the flowers, have returned.